Situational awareness can be a significant requirement in the management of operations, such as aviation, air traffic control, ship navigation, power plant operations, military command and control, emergency services such as firefighting and policing, self-driving automobiles and bicycles, and the like. Situational awareness is generally defined as the perception of environmental elements with respect to time and/or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status after some variable has changed, such as time, or some other variable, such as a predetermined event. It is also a field of study concerned with perception of the environment critical to decision-makers in complex, dynamic areas such as the ones listed above.
Situational awareness involves being aware of what is happening in the vicinity, in order to understand how information, events, and one's own actions will impact goals and objectives, both immediately and in the near future. One with an adept sense of situation awareness generally has a high degree of knowledge with respect to inputs and outputs of a system, i.e. an innate “feel” for situations, people, and events that play out due to variables the subject can control. Lacking or inadequate situational awareness has been identified as one of the primary factors in accidents attributed to human error. Thus, situational awareness is especially important in work domains where the information flow can be quite high and poor decisions may lead to serious consequences.
In truth, only limited situational awareness is available through scheduling tools or Gantt charts, communications, and collaboration among people assigned tasks related to a project. In fact, there is generally no common view or picture of the situation in the field; spatial awareness is also limited or non-existent. Additionally, efficiency is purposefully sacrificed so operations can avoid issues.
An oil and gas marine field may have several operators (installations, structures, vessels, resources, entities, etc.) that may be operating in the area either together or merely at the same time. For example, the marine field may have one or more platform complexes, floating storage units (FSOs), platform supply vessels, support vessels for the FSOs, inter-field vessels (used for basket transfer and ad hoc requirements), accommodation vessels, drilling rigs in field, barges, helicopter flights, well service vessels, multipurpose vessels for ROV and diving, seismic vessel, etc. The logistics involved in the operations, timing, and interaction of these various entities can be very complex and congested, especially in light of the necessary considerations of health, safety, and environment.
The logistics involved in the operations, timing, and interaction of these various operators can be further complication by the expansion of oil and gas production operations in new regions, such as the Arctic. This increasing activity makes it more likely that fixed or floating production platforms, drill ships, other structures, support vessels, survey vessels, etc. will be used in these regions to perform various types of marine operations.
A concern for marine operations in such regions is potential for damage caused by objects that are uncontrolled and floating or submerged in the water, such as flotsam, jetsam, debris, icebergs, ice floes, and other threats (“marine obstacles”). In icy regions, for example, large icebergs and strong ice floes can pass through survey, production, and drilling areas. Weather conditions may also pose threats to operators and their operations. Although vessels, structures, and the like may be designed to handle some impacts from such marine obstacles and weather conditions, they may have limits on how long impacts can be sustained and what force of potential impacts can be handled safely.
For these reasons, the desire is to have improved sharing and visualization in such a complex marine field having multiple operators performing various operations. To that end, the subject matter of the present disclosure is directed to overcoming, or at least reducing the effects of, one or more of the problems set forth above.